Researchers discover novel therapy for Crohn's disease

(Press-News.org) The Nutritional Immunology and Molecular Medicine Laboratory (NIMML) research team at Virginia Tech has discovered important new information on the efficacy of conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) in treating Crohn's disease, a form of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). CLA is a naturally occurring acid found in meat and dairy products known for its anti-cancer and immune modulatory properties.

In collaboration with the Division of Gastroenterology and Hepathology at University of North Carolina School of Medicine and the Wake Forest Medical Center, researchers found that Crohn's patients who took supplementary CLA showed noticeable improvement. "In our recent open label study of CLA as a supplement in study subjects with mild to moderate CD there was a marked improvement in disease activity and quality of life in 50% of the subjects. CLA was well tolerated by all of the study subjects. These findings are very encouraging and will need to be verified in a randomized controlled trial," said Professor Kim L. Isaacs, a Professor of Gastroenterology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The two main manifestations of IBD—Crohn's and ulcerative colitis—afflict over 1.4 million people in the United States. Symptoms include abdominal cramping, fever, fatigue, loss of appetite, skin and mouth ulcers, and diarrhea or constipation. In addition, the risk of developing colorectal cancer increases by about one percent yearly in IBD patients. Currently, there is no cure for Crohn's disease and the exact causes of it aren't fully understood.

CLA affords those afflicted with mild to moderate IBD an effective treatment without the unwanted side effects of many synthetic drugs. "Furthermore, we have demonstrated that probiotic bacteria can produce CLA locally and suppress colitis. Therefore, CLA can be administered directly in capsules or indirectly through CLA-producing probiotic bacteria," said Dr. Raquel Hontecillas, an Assistant Professor of Immunology at NIMML.

NIMML strives to develop safer and more effective therapies for human chronic inflammatory diseases from Nature's own medicine cabinet. To achieve this, NIMML uses advanced computational modeling in addition to mechanistic and clinical experimentation. "The validation of the anti-inflammatory actions of CLA in the gut is in line with our goal because CLA is a natural fatty acid found in milk and ruminant products. The fully integrated bioinformatics, nutrition and immunology experimentation capabilities of NIMML enable the acceleration of translational biomedical research from computational and mathematical modeling into the clinic. CLA is an example of an anti-inflammatory compound in a pipeline of naturally occurring and synthetic compounds (e.g., abscisic acid, eleostearic acid, terephthalanilides) with tremendous therapeutic and prophylactic potential as anti-inflammatories," said Dr. Josep Bassaganya-Riera, a Professor of Immunology, principal investigator of this human clinical trial, and the Director of the NIMML and the Center for Modeling Immunity to Enteric Pathogens.

These findings, reported in the most recent edition of Clinical Nutrition1, were awarded the American College of Gastroenterology Presidential Poster of distinction for human clinical trials.



INFORMATION:

For more information about the pre-clinical and clinical capabilities of the Laboratory please visit the NIMML Web Portal at www.nimml.org.

This clinical study was funded by a grant from Cognis GmbH, Monheim, Germany to Josep Bassaganya-Riera. Cognis is now part of BASF, The Chemical Company.

1Bassaganya-Riera, J., R. Hontecillas, W.T. Horne, M. Sandridge, H. Herfarth, R. Bloomfeld, and K. Isaacs (2012) Conjugated linoleic modulates immune responses in patients with Mild to Moderately active Crohn's disease. Clinical Nutrition. In Press.

About the Nutritional Immunology and Molecular Medicine Laboratory

The Nutritional Immunology and Molecular Medicine Laboratory (NIMML) conducts translational research aimed at developing novel therapeutic and prophylactic approaches for modulating immune and inflammatory responses. The group combines computational modeling, bioinformatics approaches, pre-clinical experimentation and human clinical studies to better understand the mechanisms of immune regulation at mucosal surfaces and ultimately accelerate the development of novel treatments for infectious and immune-mediated diseases www.nimml.org. In addition, the NIMML team leads the NIAID-funded Center for Modeling Immunity to Enteric Pathogens (www.modelingimmunity.org).

About the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute

The Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech is a premier bioinformatics, computational biology, and systems biology research facility that uses transdisciplinary approaches to science, combining information technology, biology, and medicine. These approaches are used to interpret and apply vast amounts of biological data generated from basic research to some of today's key challenges in the biomedical, environmental, and agricultural sciences. With more than 240 highly trained multidisciplinary, international personnel, research at the institute involves collaboration in diverse disciplines such as mathematics, computer science, biology, immunology, biochemistry, systems biology, statistics, economics, synthetic biology, and medicine. The large amounts of data generated by this approach are analyzed and interpreted to create new knowledge that is disseminated to the world's scientific, governmental, and wider communities.